The car

Atlas One

This is the thing we've been building. It's not pretty up close, there's tape involved, but it drives itself around a track, and every wire and line of code on it came from a student.

Atlas Autoware's self-driving car on the grass, LiDAR puck and depth camera on a laser-cut deck over an RC chassis The real thing, not a render
What's on it

A spinning LiDAR, some
cameras, and a lot of zip ties.

The short version: a LiDAR on top, a couple of cameras up front, an IMU for balance, and a GPU in the back running everything we wrote. Getting all of it to agree on what's happening at the same time was harder than any single piece.

  • It fuses the sensors liveLiDAR, cameras, and the IMU get merged into one view of the world.
  • Drive-by-wireWe converted the steering and throttle so code can drive it. This took forever.
  • Built on ROS 2So we can swap out one part without the whole thing falling over.
Under the hood

Spec sheet

Primary sensor360° spinning LiDAR
VisionStereo + wide-angle cameras
LocalizationGPS-RTK + IMU fusion
ComputeOnboard NVIDIA GPU
SoftwareROS 2 · C++ / Python
ControlDrive-by-wire actuation
Perception rate30+ Hz
Built by100% students
The code

What happens between
"sees a cone" and "doesn't hit it."

01 · See it

Raw point clouds and camera frames turn into "okay, there's a lane here, a cone there, open road ahead." Easy to say, painful to get right.

02 · Guess what moves

If something's moving, we take a guess at where it's going next, so the car isn't only reacting to where things are right now.

03 · Pick a path

It figures out the actual line to drive, staying in bounds, avoiding stuff, and redoes that math constantly as things change.

04 · Drive it

Finally the plan becomes real steering and throttle. Get this part slightly wrong and the car wobbles like it's had too much coffee.

Where we've taken it

How it's actually
gone so far.

We're a young team, so this isn't a wall of trophies, it's more like a list of times we showed up, learned a ton, and occasionally did really well. The honest version:

Sep '26
Up next

30th RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition

Our next start line: the 30th RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition, held at IEEE VTC 2026 in Boston, September 6–9. Real wheel-to-wheel autonomous racing. We're rebuilding the car for speed and counting down the days. Event page →

Up next
Jun '26
This summer

IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2026

IV 2026 in Detroit. We made it to the start, but a last-minute technical issue stopped us short and we couldn't finish. Gutting, honestly, but we walked away knowing exactly what to harden before the next race.

DNF, technical issues
2022
Our first one

8th place at IGVC (virtual)

Our very first competition, and it was fully virtual, everything ran in simulation. IGVC went online that year, so we raced our autonomy stack against a mostly-college field and finished 8th. No physical car yet, just our code proving it could hold its own.

8th at IGVC 2022 (sim)
Day one
How it began

Where it started

A few of us, a secondhand chassis, a box of sensors, and zero idea what we were doing. Somehow that turned into a car that holds its own against college teams.

The beginning
If you're still reading

Want to help the next
version be better?

Every upgrade, a sharper sensor, a faster GPU, a tank of gas to get to the next event, comes out of whatever we can scrape together. A little help goes a long way for a team our size.

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